GOD
IS AN INFINITE SPHERE
WHOSE CENTER
IS EVERYWHERE AND WHOSE
CIRCUMFERENCE IS NOWHERE.
Nicholas of Cusa
We rely on digital tools for many things, yet rarely understand how they work. Gaining insight is not always an option. First, due to the proprietary nature of much corporate tech. Second, because understanding how an advanced AI came to generate a particular output can be impossible. Our ignorance and lack of power with respect to encrypted systems is difficult to endure. How does this situation register in art?
This group exhibition builds upon the recent book Poetics of Encryption: Art and the Technocene by Nadim Samman. It explores the crypt in encryption, surveying an imaginative landscape marked by Black Sites, Black Boxes, and Black Holes. These terms indicate how emerging tech captures users; how it works in secret; and how it distorts cultural space-time. Three sections showcase these themes. Throughout, the exhibition toggles between enlightened concern and occult dreaming.
Each chapter proposes an imaginative model for where an intelligent, embodied human is placed in relation to the realm of digital secrets and hidden mechanisms. The artworks gathered under the heading Black Site explore the state of being locked in: captured or contained, buried in a technological grave. Black Box explores how artists picture the state of being intellectually locked out of ubiquitous consumer and industrial products. Finally, Black Hole considers how super-dense digital archives and/or computational processes scramble distinctions between inside and outside (locked down), before and after, sense and nonsense.
In the latent space between exclusion, occlusion, secrecy, questing, and speculation concerning technology’s inside, there unfolds an emergent poetic of encryption.
Free admission
Curator: Nadim Samman
